Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws: Americans Search for a New Foreign Policy.

• Author: Rossiter, Caleb

Michael Klare is perplexed. He sees the United States pursuing a bizarre national-security policy, and he wants to find out why. In Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws, Klare takes on the official justifications for Cold War levels of spending and military might in a post-Cold War world. With devastating logic and clear writing, he tears to shreds the arguments that the Pentagon, State Department, and National Security Council use when they prepare their plans for arming one-and-a-half million troops, and spending $260 billion a year on the military.

There's only one problem with Klare's book: it's nearly irrelevant. That's a sad commentary not on the book, but on the way arms-making corporations have seized control of the political process in Washington.

Since the end of the Cold War, ideas no longer matter in determining the broad outlines of national-security policy. There is no battle of ideas to win, only a brawl to divvy up the juiciest slices of pork left in the federal government, which are contracts under the military budget and approvals for foreign-arms sales. Klare, who teaches peace and world-security studies at Hampshire College, can't be faulted for not knowing this, since he doesn't work inside the Beltway, where those of us who do have to live this absurd reality every day.

Klare's thesis is that to maintain their size and funding, the military services and the National Security Council collude to exaggerate threats, which are then used to plan an overblown military force. Specifically, he argues that faced with the loss of the Soviet enemy, the military services fashioned a "bottom-up review" based on the dubious assumption that the United States should be ready to fight two simultaneous wars against "rogue nations" such as North Korea and Iran. Klare then shows how the Pentagon and the National Security Council demonized these "rogues." While these nations are certainly aggressive, have amassed substantial forces, and are trying to acquire nuclear weapons, they are in one or more of these characteristics no different from a number of our "friends," such as Pakistan, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia.

Widespread acceptance of the overblown threat, argues Klare, is the reason that the Administration and Congress have been unable to cut the armed forces and pursue the far-wiser strategies of international demilitarization and development that he proposes in the last chapter of the book. Klare shoots the fish in this barrel, showing...